Welsh translation sector worth up to £8 million a year - new report

"Errors" is maybe an incomplete way of putting it. We're well past AI and computers being used for significant portions of translation, but in the effort to standardise the process with computers we've (the public at large) forgotten that translation is an art that deals with the fact that not all ideas are equally or consistently expressible in every language. The choice of how to translate or say ideas can sometimes depend on your age, region, membership in certain communities, and even your personal flavour of politics - equally so in English, Welsh, or any other language. Often, there's enough room for interpretation that the accuracy and conformance to standards of a translation is something you want someone responsible for - it's basically useless right now to ask an AI why it made a decision weeks ago if it turns out that choice caused problems, or had a tone or implication that the original person didn't intend for it to have. Translators are involved in politics and law, so it's necessary that we have clear communication going on! Personally, I also worry that in doing so we would also stop being able to take responsiblity for directing change in our language. If a translator or writer today chooses, in a given context, to deviate from a linguistic convention, they are both responsible for and intentional about that choice, and because of that we have languages that for the most part develop and grow due to their speakers. Languages are alive like this and have been forever: sometimes we need new words for new ideas, need to replace old words with ones that reflect modern times, or sometimes just get tired saying two whole words and so skip half the syllables! I don't fancy big tech companies and their AI models having more of a say over that evolution of culture than Welsh speakers in Wales, myself, so it's hard for me to be fully on-board with AI for all translation; especially when so much Welsh-language written text, including most of the first "official" uses of new terms, is bilingual and thus has translators working in one direction or the other all over it. I can't claim to know exactly what the translators asked meant by "cultural nuance", but I imagine part of it was this grey area, where having a single "right answer" given by an AI might actually fool someone into not knowing there are a variety of different ways that people of different stripes might say that, and that translators actually do an important job in taking ownership of and responsibility for those choices. I'm not saying AI will never do that - people are certainly working on it - but that's a really different and much harder problem than just reducing the number of explicit errors in those translations. Disclaimer: not a translator myself, but I do work on software that lets translators localise programs in multiple languages.